Interviews

D&D Online Roundtable

We get a sit-down session with some of the minds behind the upcoming MMORPG.

It's not often that you have a chance to gather half a dozen extremely busy people and get them to talk to you at length about the very thing that's making them extremely busy in the first place. But that's just what the team at Turbine and Wizards of the Coast's own Ed Stark have done for us. They agreed to sit in on a roundtable and talk at length about not only the game, but on RPG gaming in general -- analog and digital, online and off. Here's a list of who's who: Ken Troop, Lead Designer (Turbine); Pete MacDonald, Senior Artist (Turbine); Dan Ogles, Senior Engineer (Turbine); David Eckelberry, Game Systems Designer (Turbine); and finally, Ed Stark, Special Projects Manager, RPG R&D (Wizards of the Coast). The roundtable was moderated by GameSpy's Miguel Lopez.

We'd like to thank them for taking time out of their busy schedules to talk with us. We hope you find their output enlightening.

Ken Troop: Over the last year and a half, we've had a number of face-to-face meetings at Wizards of the Coast about the vision and scope of Dungeons & Dragons Online. We supplemented those meetings with various documents in which we covered the game and backstory for WotC. Finally, at various milestones, we've opened up the build to WotC so that they can play and give us feedback on where the game is at.

WotC has been an enthusiastic and terrific partner in this process. I think they appreciate how much we love and respect the D&D experience, and they in turn have been very supportive when we need to tweak the translation from the pen and paper to the Online Role-Playing (ORPG) medium, either because of technical or design reasons.

Pete MacDonald: WoTC has provided us with some great illustrations to establish the look of Eberron and they have been clear and consistent about what are the most important things to capture. At the same time they are giving us fairly loose reigns on designing the setting on Xen'drik, especially Stormreach itself. Online communities have a lot of demands for the environment they game in, so this has been sort of a necessity.

David Eckelberry: Better than your average long-distance relationship (we're in Boston, they're in Seattle). Fortunately for us, we have a great game on our hands before we ever started. We have the words of Keith, Jon, Monte, and Skipand if you want to go further back, Zeb, Gary, and Daveto construct a game from. It's a tremendous and deep game bible, undoubtedly a more comprehensive one than any other game.

Ed Stark: Turbine, Wizards, and Atari started collaborating on D&D Online even before the game was on anyone's scheduleand that's the way to work. At Wizards, we've found everyone gets more excited about a project when they feel they have a hand in its creation as well as its development. Turbine's designers have been so great about sharing their ideas with us in the RPG department of Wizards that we've grown more and more excited about the project and more and more eager to help out. We don't feel like we're just in a licensee/licensor relationship, but partners in a project we all can't wait to see succeed.